


Bundle Overdrive 3: Terminal Vendetta (A Review)

by silverr



Category: Progressive Insurance "Flo" Commercials
Genre: Homage, In-Universe Book or Movie Review, Parody, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:33:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27470527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverr/pseuds/silverr
Summary: “While I am willing to admit that the filmBundle Overdrive: Terminal Vendettais to some extent a train wreck, I cannot agree with those who dismiss it as complete and utter garbage. Certainly it has its flaws, but I was so unexpectedly charmed, delighted, and entertained by its complete disregard for genre purity and plausible narrative that I am awarding it three stars.”⭐⭐⭐
Comments: 10
Kudos: 10
Collections: Fic In A Box, Three-Day Wonders





	Bundle Overdrive 3: Terminal Vendetta (A Review)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [debirlfan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/debirlfan/gifts).



> A [link to the ad.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wIDiclzgjY)
> 
> _This fanwork is dedicated, with much love, to Roger Ebert._

# (Warning! Massive spoilers ahead!)

In _The Screenwriters Taxonomy: A Collaborative Approach to Creative Storytelling,_ award-winning screenwriter and cinema scholar Eric R. Williams identifies eleven "super-genres" that guide all feature-length narrative films: Action, Crime, Fantasy, Horror, Romance, Science Fiction, Slice of Life, Sports, Thriller, War, and Western.

Although there are "pure" examples of each genre among the enduring masterpieces of cinema, the preponderance mix two or three genres to create an intoxicating, skillfully blended cocktail. In general (and to invert a phrase), more is less. However, there are those audacious auteurs who dare to mix four or five (or more!) genres in a single film, brewing up a concoction that, like a Long Island Iced Tea, either intoxicates or leaves one feeling ill. (Although, given enough time, it may do both.)

The latest offering of the Bundle Overdrive franchise, _Terminal Vendetta,_ is such a concoction. Co-directed by the creative team of Udja Corrada and Henri Heimeau, _Terminal Vendetta_ sees the return of Flo and Jamie, the intrepid heroes of the previous two installments in the series, and also the return of some familiar faces from the villainous side of the ledger.

To summarize the plot — which involves ghosts, time travel, aliens, and the exposure of an hitherto-unknown struggle between the genus _Musa_ of the order of _Zingiberales_ and the genus _Malus_ of the order of _Rosales_ (in layman's terms, between bananas and apples) — in a way both comprehensive and comprehensible may be impossible, but I will try.

We open to learn that Flo and Jamie, the charismatic heroes of the previous two installments in the franchise, have been invited to Thanksgiving dinner at the Thompsons, the plucky couple that helped Flo and Jamie foil the dastardly plans of Doktor Hail's Weather Damage cabal in the previous movie. During the pre-dinner socializing, the Thompsons had apparently joked that, because of a ghost they keep seeing in the mudroom, they might need to get "haunted mansion" coverage for the recently purchased and somewhat ramshackle turn of the century house. (To clarify for my younger readers: the Thompsons' house is from the _nineteenth,_ not the twentieth, century.) The intrepid insurers had taken this request in stride, and offered to do a preliminary evaluation of the property while the Thompsons ran out for more cranberry sauce. Flo and Jamie quickly discover a hidden room containing a sea-captain's journal; among other things, the journal documents the last voyage of a ship, the _Golden Treasure_ , that sank in 1589 AD. (Or possibly BCE — neither the sea-captain nor the film is sure about this.) Before Flo and Jamie can examine the journal fully, a mysterious person (disguised as a repairman) shows up, overloads the house's electrical system in order to start a fire, and uses the subsequent confusion to steal the journal.

What follows stirs an entire spice rack's worth of action and thriller elements into the initial melange of horror and fantasy: explosions, chases through exotic settings (more on that in a bit), attempted murder, hijackings, well-hidden but far-reaching conspiracies, industrial espionage and sabotage, seductions, implausibly-timed self-reflection, epic fight scenes, a scheme for global catastrophe worthy of a Bond villain, heroic self-sacrifice, betrayals, an aggressive soundtrack, and the world's most nail-bitingly tense backgammon game. (Which I believe takes place as part of an archery competition, but sometimes I can't read my own notes.) Add a sprinkling of scifi by weaving in an alien subplot, some contrasting down-to-earthness through a scene set in a quaint mom-and-pop diner, a dollop of extreme cuteness in the form of an overly-curious, impossibly adorable dog, and top it off with an _Inception_ -esque final image, and all that's you'd need to put a tick mark next to every genre on the list would be a tank and a cowboy. (They should have made the combination archery-backgammon tournament part of a rodeo in a war-torn country. Missed opportunity there, Udja and Henri!)

Now, I know what you're saying: "This sounds like a mish-mash mixed bag muddle!" And yes, it is, but while I am willing to admit that the film is to some extent a train wreck, I cannot agree with those who dismiss it as complete and utter garbage. Certainly it has its flaws, but I was so unexpectedly charmed, delighted, and entertained by its complete disregard for genre purity and plausible narrative that I am awarding it three stars.

Before I explain that rating, and am honest about what doesn't work (and why), a little background on the film's production woes.

According to some insiders who agreed to speak off the record, despite the success of the first two films _(Bundle Overdrive: Unsecured Rider_ and _Bundle Overdrive2: Umbrella Policy),_ the studio execs inexplicably slashed the initial budget for the third film by almost seventy percent. (To do this to a franchise _after_ you have established the fanbase is unforgivable.) As if that wasn't enough, the writer-directors were burdened by a script gutted even before it was written, as two actors whose characters had been integral to the earlier films (Obialo Okwukwe as The Master Actuary, and Madina Dratchev as The Field Adjuster) were unavailable due to undisclosed reasons. When you factor in such constraints, you may be reminded of Samuel Johnson's remark about dogs walking on their hind legs: _"It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."_

So yes, given those circumstances we _should_ be surprised that it was done at all, and cut Progressive Studios slightly more slack than we would give to Disney or Warner Brothers.

Having said that, and before I discuss what, in my eyes, redeems the film from the trash heap, let me enumerate those aspects of the film that are fair game for criticism.

 **The settings.** The settings are generally uninspired. (The lone exception is the lab of the exotic fruit breeder, ostensibly in Dharamshala.) All we see of the Thompson's house other than the garage, mudroom, and secret room sets is an establishing long shot of the exterior facade. The scenes set at Flo and Jamie's offices are generic cubicle decor. The street scenes are populated, not with carefully choreographed extras, but with photo-bombers. The train on which they encounter the exploding fruit basket is clearly not in India or China, but a stationary outdoor exhibit in New England. The super-banana warehouse is nothing special, and the "casino" hosting the backgammon-archery tournament looks like a slightly-dressed Elk's Lodge. The only authentic-seeming location is the final scene, but that might be due to the standard "I'm walking here!" that is required by law to appear in every film scene set in New York. (Thanks again for that, Dustin.)

 **The special effects.** SFX can certainly be a big-ticket item. _Bundle Overdrive: Terminal Vendetta_ had only a very small ticket, which was going to be good for only one, very short, ride. Unfortunately, they needed a ghost, a flashback to a disaster at sea with a 16th-century galleon, and a handful of alien effects. Instead of picking one of these three, they appear to have opted to divide their SFX money evenly, resulting in three mediocre effects rather than one reasonably good and two execrable. That was probably the right call; no matter what the LAT film critic says, the effects in _Terminal Velocity_ are just competent enough to escape ridicule, yet uninspired enough not to call outshine the rest of the movie. (In the movie biz, unless your production teams are as dedicated as cult members, you usually get about half of what you pay for.)

 **The screenplay**. Neither of the preceding would matter much if the screenplay was excellent. Alas, it is not; we are not dealing with Tarantino here, which reminds me of what Roger Ebert said when he dubbed _Pulp Fiction_ a "Great Film":

> Watching many movies, I realize that all of the dialogue is entirely devoted to explaining or furthering the plot, and no joy is taken in the style of language and idiom for its own sake. […] Most conversations in most movies are deadly boring, which is why directors with no gift for dialogue depend so heavily on action and special effects.

I think we can agree that Heimeau and Corrada stand with the majority of writer-directors on the non-Tarantino side of the divide in terms of dialogue. But what of plot?

When a narrative choice is puzzling, it is sometimes impossible to determine whether it was driven by vision or by budgetary necessity. Take the absence of the Thompsons, for example: although the film opens inside their new old house, we never see or hear them at all. They are present purely though Flo and Jamie's expository dialog. Are we looking at a bold creative choice here — a literal metaphor for the withdrawal of the white middle class from engagement with the issues of the day? Does their "trip to the grocery store" symbolize relentless Bezosian materialism, with the canned cranberry sauce a potent symbol of the compartmentalization and commodification of blood-red vitality? Or is it just that keeping the Thompsons off-screen saved the cost of two actors?

Then there are those aspects of the plot that were guided less frugality than by fuzzy thinking. (Or perhaps they couldn't afford a continuity person?) For example, after Flo and Jamie escape the super-banana warehouse/headquarters and crash the tournament at the casino, Jamie coaches Flo to victory in her backgammon games by a _Leverage_ -worthy setup: Flo shows him the board via a button camera in her ring, and Jamie communicates moves to her via earbud — but wouldn't these items have been confiscated by the kidnappers? And how, exactly, is Jamie receiving the transmission from Flo's ring?

Then there's the scene with the gumbo-loving old man (played by long-time character actor Bailey Wells). What was the point of this? Ostensibly, it was to tease us into wondering whether we were in the Big Apple or the Big Banana timeline — but the final scene, with old Jamie eating his lunch in Central Park, accomplished exactly the same thing in a much more naturalistic way. Weren't we all invested in knowing which fruit he was pulling from that battered paper bag?

 **Fight scenes.** There's really only one set piece, when the octopus trainer and and the second, non-evil repairperson face off against the newly-unmasked archery instructor. A by-the-numbers mano-a-mano that gets the job done, it hardly breaks new ground in fight choreography. (In other words, neither Daniel Hernandez nor Woo Ping have anything to worry about.)

Alright. Now that my criticisms are out of the way, let's look at what _does_ work in this film.

 **The Cast.** As mentioned before, the only two actors in _Bundle Overdrive3: Terminal Vendetta_ that appeared in the previous films are Flo and Jamie. Aside from a small-but-key cameo role by former teen heartthrob Matt Dillon as the informant who sacrifices himself to save Jamie, the rest of the cast are unknowns making their debut. There are some standouts among them: one can only wish they'd been given a script worthy of bringing out more than a glimmer of their talents.

As always, Flo and Jamie are able to carry even the most ludicrous action sequences forward with humor and grace, but both of them show true emotional range in some of the quieter scene. In particular, Jamie's discussion of his disastrous prom, and how his date (played with luminous gentleness by Jelena Penclina in the flashback) helped him recognize the truth about his queerness. Jamie is able to mentor Flo in the same way, and encourage her to explore her true self (if only briefly) with the blackjack dealer at the casino. Flo and Jamie's friendship and teamwork are the heart of the film, as well as its foundation.

Opposing them are the evil grinning teeth of their nameless masked nemesis played with great relish and raw physical power by Lauren Barger. Even though she doesn't enter the film until just past the half-way point, she dominates every scene she's in. Appearing at first to be an assassin carrying out a hit on behalf of Doktor Hail, and then a Swedish archery instructor, we ultimately discover that she is in fact the leader of alien forces, intent on recovering the cargo of the sunken ship, and willing to kill Flo and Jamie to make sure they don't get in the way.

The initial attempt on Flo and Jamie's life leads us to one of the other truly moving subplots in this at times unsubtle film. In tracing the origin of the explosive fruit basket given to them on the train, Flo and Jamie follow a trail to Dharamshala, where an exotic fruit breeder (played with gravity and heart-rending pathos by Pat Callahan), is trying to cross an apple with an agave to develop a banana-destroying fruit — not to kill people, but to save the life of their severely banana-allergic lover (Jay Vanantwerp). Vanantwerp plays the frail aristocrat with a delicate world-weariness that would not be out of place in a production of _Brideshead Revisited._

And that leads us to Bluebop (Mike Bissler, appearing in the credits as "Fringe friend."). A staple of the action film is the conspiracy theorist, the overly-intense guy (they're almost always guys) who has either a room full of cork-boards with red string connecting dozens of photos and newspaper clippings, or battered banker's boxes of hard evidence. More then a little unhinged, they're also generally entertaining — which they have to be, because they usually have to deliver massive info dumps. Bissler pulls this off in a virtuoso, interrobang-filled rant that starts with time travel and just gets weirder from there. He insists that the lethal fruit basket is connected to a war of mythic proportions between factions of the plant kingdom, which somehow also resulted in the founding of Apple Computer ("Apple! Macintosh! Get it?!!"). Standard Illuminati-pyramid fare, until he _also_ ties the development of the NeXT computer in 1985 ("1985 rearranged is 1589! And what happened that year?!") to the sinking of the _Golden Treasure_ , apparently because the ship's cargo was an apple-destroying banana accidentally developed by alien visitors who've been chilling on Earth since the Ice Age. Apple is, of course, secretly working with "good aliens," underwriting the retrieval of the ship (remember, Bad Guys NEVER use iPhones) so that the evil aliens can't travel back in time and change history to ensure banana dominance. It's beyond preposterous, and yet when Bluebop urges Flo and Jamie to write or tattoo _New York has always been the Big Apple, not the Big Banana_ on their forearms, his whispered, "If Apple ever changes to Banana, you'll know what happened," literally gave me chills.

That's not enough, you say? Well, how about Andy Shotwell and Michelle Moore as the mooks sent by the bad aliens to capture Flo and Jamie? Far too often you see small thankless parts like this played without a drop of humor, but these two, in their short time on-screen, manage to dig every scrap of meaning out of the script and become delightfully comic foils to Jamie and Flo.

Already mentioned was Jelena Penclina's performance as Jamie's prom date; two more potential supporting Actor nominations could go to Jeff Charney as the second grade teacher young Jamie worshiped, and who broke the young boy's heart by favoring the spelling bee champion (Meghan Walsh) as his teacher's pet. And though he had only three lines, I loved Bruce Perlman's talkative mechanic. Yes, he was a shameless device for exposition, but so what?

And don't get me started on the chemistry between Flo and the blackjack dealer played by Amanda Lupica! Those two absolutely sizzled. (If Jamie ever wants to take a sabbatical to pursue excellence in his many areas of interest, I know who could keep the motorcycle seat warm for him. Rawr!)

That actually brings me to my last two points, which are the **Unexpected plot twists** and the **Unexpectedly strong thematic elements.**

I've already discussed the deftness (and okay, some of the clumsiness too) of the twist at the end with "old Jamie" on the bench, but an eagle-eyed viewer on Reddit pointed out an easter egg that I had completely missed. Remember the chatty gang boss who appears just before the camera pans to Old Jamie and his paper sack lunch? As the gang boss tells the jaywalker not to get upset because the bananas that fell on him were just a bunch (Ha!) of kids doing a science experiment, he waves up at the roof; if you pause at just the right moment, you'll see as the sleeve of his hoodie slides up that he too has a "New York was always" tattoo — although, coyly, Corrada and Heimeau hide those last few words.

What they don't hide is their deliberately diverse, humanist, even — dare I say it? — _feminist_ worldview. The cast is refreshingly diverse, in multiple ways. Flo and the other female characters drive the plot; the male characters primarily provide backup. 

Now, there are those who foam at the mouth any time anyone brings up diversity and representation, and will tell you that it is not at all welcome in a scifi-action-thriller. Such people are so hysterically opposed to anyone not a white cishet male "invading" their bastion that they will go through truly _astounding_ contortions to prove that such characters are either (a) not the heroes of the film, or (b) not even in the film at all! Think I'm kidding? A prominent critic who I will not name (but you all know who it is) insists that there is no queer representation in _Terminal Vendetta,_ that the fruit seller and the aristocrat, and the tall repairperson and the octopus trainer, and Flo and the blackjack dealer, are all "only friends, nothing more." (They also toss Jamie and Bluebop in the Erasure Vat as well. I think we all know why.)

And, if I might step on my soapbox for a moment — oops, seems I'm already here! — I have a few things to say about that.

First, if you need to view the world (and movies) through narrowed eyes and tightly pursed, joyless lips, that's your prerogative and your loss, but I don't have to. Second, monogamous heterosexuality is on a pinnacle because people _put_ it there, not because it is inherently far superior to anything else. This movie, this big, silly, chaotic mess of a movie, shows us the beauty and power of all sorts of relationships, shows us that there is "plenty of more."

And isn't that what Art — including film — is supposed to do?

P.S. At the time of this writing, rumors are circulating that _Bundle Overdrive4: Open Peril_ has been shelved indefinitely (or possibly even scrapped), but so far these are merely whispers on the wind, and I choose to cling to hope.

.

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> The Williams book is real, and gave me the idea for the opening.


End file.
